Bandwidth, Genesys Partner to Address Contact Center Migration PainsBandwidth, Genesys Partner to Address Contact Center Migration Pains

Today, Bandwidth announced that its global bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) product, Duet, is now available for Genesys contact center customers. To date, Bandwidth has aimed Duet at UCaaS deployments and currently has partnerships with Microsoft Teams and RingCentral. Genesys is the first CCaaS provider to partner with Bandwidth, or any provider, in such a way.

The approach Bandwidth took was sensible as enterprise adoption of UCaaS was well ahead of CCaaS. The pandemic and having agents work from home changed that, and now larger companies are looking to move contact centers to the cloud. I recently had a conversation with a reseller and asked him where he saw the demand for CCaaS, and he emphatically stated that it’s all company sizes in all verticals.

However, moving an enterprise contact center to the cloud is significantly more challenging than for a small business. It makes sense for a small business to buy a turnkey CCaaS solution. The requirements are fairly basic, and their IT staff tends to be a few jack-of-all-trades professionals vs. specialists. Smaller companies are also generally willing to adapt their processes to meet the functionality of a product.

Larger companies tend to like to keep their carrier contracts separate from their software and cloud purchases, hence the popularity of BYOC for UCaaS. The deployments are much more complex as the workflows can be quite intricate. Global companies need to worry about regional regulatory issues, and often enterprise-class organizations are targets of threat actors.

Bandwidth’s Duet solution addresses many of these issues by making migrating to cloud contact center easier for Genesys customers. At a basic level, the unbundling of the telecom service from the contact center gives organizations more control over communications. Bandwidth also offers CPaaS services, enabling companies to integrate other applications at the API layer. I’ve been bullish on the concept of composable communications, and cloud APIs are a critical part of bringing composability to the contact center.

Another benefit to customers is that Bandwidth has implemented STIR/SHAKEN in its network. Without getting into too much technical detail, STIR/SHAKEN is a technology framework designed to cut down on the number of fraudulent robocalls and reduce illegal phone number spoofing. Bandwidth implemented the technology in late 2019 and are currently signing (authenticating) over four billion calls per month and has established interoperability to other major carriers. This ensures that outbound calls from the contact center won’t be blocked and can’t be spoofed either.

For Genesys, this partnership should be significant in helping it migrate its legacy customers to its CCaaS solution. The company has a long history in contact centers and a massive on-premises base. Before the pandemic, most contact centers were probably content with keeping their on-prem system. But now, data points to contact centers maintaining a high percentage of remote agents into the future. Anecdotally, about three-quarters of contact center managers that I’ve talked to have told me they intend to maintain a remote set of agents. The pandemic pushed companies into trying it, but obvious economic benefits and the ongoing struggle to find talent is making remote work for agents more palatable moving forward.

Simplifying the migration from on-premises to public cloud should help Genesys accelerate its customers’ migration and do it before one of their competitors do. BYOC has already proven to have UCaaS benefits, and now they are being brought to the contact center. Genesys and Bandwidth might be the first to partner in this area, but it won’t be the last.